Enacting the pluriverse in the West: contemplative activism as a challenge to the disenchanted one-world world
| Published date | 01 June 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231200864 |
| Author | Suzanne Klein Schaarsberg |
| Date | 01 June 2024 |
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JR
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https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231200864
European Journal of
International Relations
2024, Vol. 30(2) 434 –460
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661231200864
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Enacting the pluriverse in
the West: contemplative
activism as a challenge to the
disenchanted one-world world
Suzanne Klein Schaarsberg
Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Abstract
Within IR, scholars are starting to consider difference on the level of ontology rather than
epistemology. Other worlds are introduced into IR’s political pluriverse, however, these
are often encountered in faraway places, thereby playing into the colonial narrative that
ontological difference does not exist in the ‘West’. This paper introduces another real
from within the ‘disenchanted North’ that is shaped by contemplative activists: people
using contemplation as a form of protest. An engagement with contemplative activism
challenges our commonly held assumptions about what contemplation and social change
are, thereby undermining the institutions of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ underlying the universe.
It argues that the project of political ontology in IR should consist of two moves: drawing
in other, in particular spiritual, realities into the political imaginations of IR and challenging
the ontological assumptions underpinning concepts. Consequently, it suggests that the
pluriverse in IR should be a methodological rather than an ontological commitment.
Keywords
Pluriverse, contemplative activism, spirituality, one-world world, uncanny, political
ontology
Introduction
Difference – or the recognition that people go about living their lives differently – is
frequently placed on the level of worldview, or epistemology. It rests on a single reality
doctrine, the modern understanding that nature is unitary and that beliefs about nature are
Corresponding author:
Suzanne Klein Schaarsberg, Tilburg University, Simon Building, Professor Cobbenhagenlaan, 5037 AB
Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Email: s.t.kleinschaarsberg@tilburguniversity.edu
1200864EJT0010.1177/13540661231200864European Journal of International RelationsKlein Schaarsberg
research-article2023
Original Article
Klein Schaarsberg 435
plural. Such a single reality perspective is based on the ontological separation of nature
and culture which underpins many Western discourses of science (Escobar, 2020; Latour,
1993; Viveiros de Castro, 1998). This single reality doctrine is beginning to be chal-
lenged both in and outside the discipline of International Relations (IR; Blaney and
Tickner, 2017; Blaney and Trownsell, 2021; FitzGerald, 2022; Hutchings, 2019;
Querejazu, 2016, 2021; Reiter, 2018b; Tickner and Querejazu, 2021). Critique has
focussed on how alternative ontologies are reduced to merely different epistemological
positions of what people perceive reality to be (Law and Lin, 2010). The single reality
doctrine or the one-world world hollows out and extinguishes alternative realities. This
has predominantly happened through the colonial project and two prime institutions of
modernity, ‘religion’ and ‘science’, through which the West has granted itself the right to
define ‘the world’ as singular (Mignolo, 2018; Rojas, 2016).
To decolonize our thinking, critics have suggested that we need to begin to undo the
one-world world by conceptualizing difference not as epistemological (different views
on a single nature) but rather as ontological, as different conceptions and enactments of
what is real. Encountering difference ontologically is in that sense political, not just
because (international) politics often involves ontological struggles over the nature of
reality (i.e. conflicts involving disputes about ‘what exists’, Strathern, 2018), it also chal-
lenges the colonial, ‘modern’ project through which Western realities are turned into the
reality (Blaney and Tickner, 2017). Emerging from a convergence between Science and
Technology Studies (STS), Anthropology, political ecology, decolonial theory and post-
humanist philosophy, what is shaping up in the social sciences, and arguably also in IR,
is a scholarly project of political ontology, treating questions of diverging ontological
assumptions as a ‘politicoconceptual problem’ (Blaser, 2013). In short, instead of reduc-
ing reality to a singularity – a universe – that others have multiple perceptions on, schol-
ars have suggested that we can study the creation of a multitude of worlds: a world of
many worlds or a pluriverse (De la Cadena and Blaser, 2018; Hutchings, 2019; Law,
2015; Querejazu, 2016; Reiter, 2018b).
In this paper, I draw on the empirical example of contemplative activism to make two
contributions to the debate on political ontology in IR. Contemplative activists respond
to global challenges such as terrorism, climate change or conflict by using contemplation
as a form of changemaking. In other words, social action becomes a form of spirituality,
and spirituality a form of social action. I argue, first, that contemplative activism decent-
ers the ‘West’ as a homogeneous ontological sphere in academic debates on the pluriv-
erse. Second, by showing that contemplative activism inspires a reconceptualization of
what social change, contemplation and even politics are in IR, I argue that the pluriverse
should be a methodological, rather than an ontological, concern for IR.
The available literature on multiple ontologies, both in IR and the broader social sci-
ences, focusses on the creation of indigenous worlds outside of what is commonly per-
ceived as the dominant ‘West’, particularly in relation to Amerindian and Aboriginal
cosmologies (Blaser, 2013; Burman, 2019; De la Cadena, 2015; Querejazu, 2016;
Salmond, 2014; Verran, 2021; Viveiros de Castro, 1998). It generally seems to be easier
to think of earth beings and ghosts mattering politically in faraway places than at the
‘West’s’ own doorstep (Fernando and Harding, 2020). Such an approach risks external-
izing strangeness and difference to locations outside the ‘West’, thereby only subscribing
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